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First look: Pixar's 'Good Dinosaur' might be its best-looking film yet

It's a busy year for Pixar. After taking a break in 2014, the animation studio will release two major new films this year: brainy adventure Inside Out, coming this July, has already received rave reviews after premiering at Cannes. Its next, The Good Dinosaur, is out in November -- and WIRED got an early first look at a short footage presentation in London this week.

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The Good Dinosaur has had a troubled history: in production since 2009, in 2013 the film was rewritten, its voices recast and its original director, Bob Peterson, replaced by first-time director Peter Sohn. "It's always started with: what if the asteroid had missed the earth?," says Sohn, who previously worked on The Incredibles and Finding Nemo, among others. "From there it's been about trying to focus what the story is. In filmmaking, or at least those I've been a part of, stories can sometimes become two stories, or three stories -- it's been about trying to boil it down, and find the emotional arc."

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The Good Dinosaur centres on Arlo, a young Apatosaurus who becomes separated from his family not long after losing his father (think Dumbo, The Lion King, and other Disney classics). He soon meets Spot, a human cave-boy, and the two set off to find home -- it's vintage Pixar fare, a smart reversal on what Sohn calls "a boy-and-his-dog story". What’s brand new for Pixar is the animation style: The Good Dinosaur is the studio’s first film to use photorealistic environments. Sohn showed the room full of film journalists footage of rain dripping on leaves -- and had to point out that it wasn't real-world footage, but CGI rendered for the film's jaw-dropping Rocky Mountain environs.

"We've been trying to find a world that could make a dinosaur feel tiny," says Sohn. "We were greatly inspired by these epic films of the frontier -- David Lean, these huge scope films. We tried to work out: how can we build that, when everything has to be rendered? How can we build 500 miles of wilderness and not blow up computers?"

One of the solutions was to base the terrain on real world environments. "There was a great idea of taking relief maps, actual data from terrain around us in the places we had visited, to use that information and to build and propagate plants on top of. So we did some really simple ways to fill that out -- through math -- and propagate water and plants and snow on this terrain. Those early tests enabled us to really fill out parts of the world." The results are absolutely stunning, and when combined the more stylised, typically Pixar dinosaurs, provide The Good Dinosaur with a visual feel unique to any animated film yet.

In a week when Jurassic World achieved the highest-grossing opening weekend of all time, we're pleased to say that Pixar has done its research, with early renders of raptor characters dotted with feathers "and haircuts that might resemble a certain Barcelona football team," says Sohn -- although quickly pointing out that the film's stylised dinosaurs aren't meant to be grounded in reality.

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It's early days -- by Sohn's calculation the film is "about 50 per cent animated" -- but on this look, expect Pixar to have another hit on its hands.